Re: Garbage Collector

[Michael van Acken <KK120y2@mail.lvr.de>]

> Ah, I see the problem now.  You're under the impression that my
goal
> is to provide an add-on GC.  Actually, I'm proprosing to replace
all
> the existing functionality with an Oberon-2 based GC.  

I know that you are not talking about an add-on gc.  But you seem to
miss the fact, that I am talking about the reality of oo2c.

> Additional functionality will be added to the compiler as needed to
> support the new GC.  This way there are no variants in terms of
> whether a GC is supported or not.  All occurrences of OOC will
> support this new GC.  No other GCs will be required or even
desired.

This may be the long term goal.  My short and mid term goal is to
ship
oo2c with functional gc support.  Obviously, I cannot ship it with a
hypothetical garbage collector.  And even if OGC exists, I cannot
dump
support for Boehm's gc as long as OGC does not support all of the
systems supported by Boehm's gc.  You see, this is required _and_
desired.  Until then (read: over the next few years, and possibly
indefinitely) oo2c will support the conservative gc.  And oo2c/gc can
only implement a fraction of the interface of OGC.Mod.

> Although, I believe that, as a start, the "GC" and "RegisterObject"
> functions are enough for the user interface.  Adding the additional
> user functions should be easy enough.

Adding them is not possible with Boehm's gc.  And the specs need to
address the fact, that they are not available for all implementations
of OOC.

-- mva